


no one ever was

by popsky



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Competitive Metagame, Gen, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 14:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2655017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popsky/pseuds/popsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a small boy, smaller pocket, and a monster that fits into it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no one ever was

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a celebration for ORAS release. ❤

 

_no one ever was_

 

-

The first time I met him, he was small.

I knew he was a trainer by his clothes. I have seen too much of them, having been captured and released several times to be wary of their characters – reckless ambition and oversized caps; too-big dreams trying to fit into such small hands. He was as young as the others, this human boy: no older than a single decade, but his shadow extended far thrice his height under the looming dusk. I realized the tip of it almost reached my feet – futilely, I had jumped back.

There had been many trainers in my life. He turns out to be a strange one.

“I’m gonna make you the very best,” everyone had said, once. “Like no one ever was.”

And he was the only one who does, a hundred times over.

 

-

Instead of sleeping, at night he writes curious things about me.

The context differs from one night to another, though the tool he uses does not change. When he first caught me, there was this irritable small machine that suddenly vibrated to life – beeping and excited despite my master filling it with trivial unimportance. It was bright red with smooth surface a glowing white, and at first I hated that very fact. Dual-colored things reminded me so much of my capture ball: a double-meaning reminder of nine times prison and one time home.

He would laugh, though, had someone say that word directly to him. _Home_ had been a rather intriguing word in his dictionary: engraved in skewed letters that looks slightly similar to his father’s handwriting. His mother says it in endless repetition, cheerfully spoken through the voice message like _come here often, darling, mommy loves you,_ as if he should stay in that one-room house with her, staring at the ever-unchanging statics in the blank screen. So my master nods to the phone, and leaves the word as it is. Freedom carries a totally different implication to the both of us.

Personal opinion, but I think that small machine is the one driving him further and further away from his home. It is a boxy, plastic thing, a device I have never seen owned by my previous trainers. I am intrigued by the so many pictures of creatures I haven’t seen before, though there are some faces that I recognize. Several, I like to eat. Another several like to eat me. Master enjoys traveling faraway to get the ones he wants, and that machine shows his steady progress from time to time.

I remember when it called my name when I was captured. The machine said I was _new_ to my master, and it was more than a little bit puzzling. Master probably knew me long before he owned me: he knew exactly where my kin lives, our traits and the attacks we use, weaknesses and the right places to hit. I always regard it with distrust - that thing probably lies to him.

But my master always listens to it, and carries it around like a very best thing he once promised me to be. I try not to be bitter about this fact, or anything along that line, but every night Master writes about me a lot in it so I suppose it is alright. He records my voice, measures my weight and body length, taking pictures with himself beside me as if he is comparing our body size. He describes in details, about the things I like and I don’t; my habit and the way I fight. It’s okay even if he does the same for every other ones he catches, because that picture with me standing next to him kind of looks good.

During nights before a battle, he would write me down in numbers. It’s the strangest thing about him that I still am unable to understand: the way he calculates the data he already knows himself, over and over again. It’s probably about battles, because he juts down things like _attack_ and _speed_ and _special defense_ and… _individual values?_ This last one stays the same over time, and I don’t even want to know what that means. I dislike the notion that there is a numerical code that identifies my worth at a predestined, specific level – set from my birth and forever cannot be changed no matter how hard I try. It isn’t a pleasing sum, I suppose, because Master never comments on it. I know when he pretends to focus on other things.

“You are going to win tomorrow,” he promises while lying on his back, right under the starry night sky. “It is going to hurt a bit, though.” He is right, of course, he always is. I listen to him because his orders are imperative, especially to my own good, and he says _that_ is more important than anything. It sounds flattering – I suppose I like the way he sets priorities, despite my mismatched values.

That morning, I win six battles all by myself, and with a smile he adds another number down my name.

 

-

He also speaks strange things every now and then.

“I am a trainer,” he says, one day, looking at me intently as though for the first time, “and you are a monster that lives in my pocket.” He pauses for a bit to caress the area under my eye, hands curling and uncurling like my lungs, the way I breathe under his guidance. His stare grows in intensity, at that. “Does that even mean anything?”

I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t care. His fingers feel so warm, tips drawing descending patterns in a universal language that means _down, down, bring your opponent down._ I follow that motion, nuzzling lower against his palm until they rest on his sides, completely still. He isn’t commanding anything.

When he walks away, though, I find myself trailing after him.

 

-

I am not his favorite.

Though, to be fair, the term ‘favorite’ never really applies to him, as he treats everyone the same way. In his eyes, we are equal; having fit a specific role in several assigned teams he had arranged, rotated frequently against different enemies. He makes sure our strengths are balanced, and orchestrates his battles accordingly.

Sometimes I feel like his opponents are just another tool he uses to build us, his personal militia of brutes, just the way he likes it. Not that I mind those weaklings, in any case. Master always says they are simply not skilled enough to win – though from observation of the general population’s capability, I think _he_ is the one too skilled to lose.

He doesn’t give us nicknames like other trainers do. Master calls us by the universal identification system of what humans name our kin by, classified by the sound of cry we make. If there are two of the same kinds, he would just add numbers after the name. The sum could go on and on depending on what he wants. He can acquire the same species several times over, searching for something in particular that is unknown for what purpose. “The nature is different from what I had in mind,” is something he would say, looking through balls and eggs after balls and eggs.

Though, he still uses them against other humans, some actual _smart_ humans who seem to know what they are doing, in special battles connected magically from faraway places. Each time he tries out different patterns, as if experiencing new ways he could bend things under his whims. I feel no new experience from such battles, but that's exactly why the challenges always feel exhilarating. The night after he always drowns himself in those statistical codes, again and again, recalculating everything again from scratch, sometimes adding strange attacks and rotating completely new teams.

Basically, for us, understanding him is completely impossible – so we are content with just watching, listening, deferring. Nothing ever goes wrong if we do that.

 

-

I am not his first partner, either.

Here, I use the word ‘partner’ with its meaning broken down and tweaked into six different factors, each letter rigidly literal but adjustable, just like my master’s way of thinking. In our kinship, partnership strictly involves the same creatures to make it work. He is human, and human calls us monsters – with various nice adjectives to go with it, all unpleasant implications toned down and readjusted – but still monsters in the end, regardless. Master and we are different in more factors than we could count, even back when his starting kindling was as young and large-eyed as him.

His actual first partners, the six Trios with red and green and blue on their eyes, are never captured, unlike the rest of us. They never chase any running prey driven by hunger gnawing in their stomachs, or struggling against natural predators with adrenaline running in leaking blood. A complete opposite to the environment we used to live in. They were raised under careful guidance of beeping machines and humans cloaked in familiar white, nurtured to be perfect companions of humans and their fragility. But make no mistake – they are as much as monsters as we the Captured are; with perfect numbers under their names and equally perfect carriage of orders: _make it weak, almost dead, **almost** , just right so I can make it mine. _They were the ones who had pinned us to the ground and made us crawl – weak and Legendary creatures alike – whose instincts honed to closely listen, to make a frightening stop at the last inch from an instant kill.

Like I said, by human definition monsters are still monsters, in the end; and all of us are similar in so many ways. Especially the way we possess revered loyalty to him that goes on so deep, so low, that equal partnership is rendered almost impossible. It might be the “Nature” inside of us that he likes to scribble down in his data, though I’m not sure (me, _sassy?_   Really?) if, by any means, _this_ is the kind of nature that’s associated with our internalized urge to obeying him.

“I wonder, partner,” he says once, with that tone of his that makes my insides curl, “if this is the last of them. Let’s guess if their boss would last three turns.”

It is after two months, and exactly fifteen bodies later, that I understand why he calls us his partners. Other trainers had tried bridging the wide gap between us through indulgent companionship, tried embedding human personalization into their own monsters. But Master perfectly understands who we are and who we are not. He doesn't try reining wild strength or wilder beasts themselves ( _for what?_ he always asks). Instead he baits our brutality into a directive, calculated, pure and raw _power_ – feeding us both with a dizzying sense of absolute victory.

It’s easy to see why we love him so much. Master – humanlike _only_ at his tendency to rationalize numbers – had since long been our partner; had since long been one of _us_.

 

-

“Someday I might lose,” he says, quietly, to the brightly lit grand stairs of the Hall of Fame. There are at least a hundred of them, each one crystalline and pure white, all identical without anybody else's footprint. I wonder if this number is already nearing his limit. But unlike other trainers, Master doesn't think that the maximum number in a monster stops at one hundred - instead he thinks it's two hundred and fifty-five.

No matter, numbers are his business, not mine. I already lost count of how many times we enter this building; we had beaten at least nine champions from six different regions, a multitude of people from different worlds, and _losing_ doesn't feel like a word anymore.

But right now he is contemplating it. “Someday, someone might come,” he mutters, “Someday there might be a perfect bred with perfect IV and maxed out EV and perfect moveset and had a type advantage against whatever I was left with. Or just a really good sweeper. Or, I don’t know, an awful critical hit or something.”

I don’t understand what he means by that (I never do), but the way he says it is different from what he promised to me initially. I keep silent and curl up more comfortably inside his pocket, through the thin material of my home ball and the warmth under his shirt.

“Let’s just grind this last one,” he sighs, and enters the Champion’s room again.

 

-

But everyone has already reached _his_ limit. Even that small machine had accumulated what had been initially his dream when he started out: seven hundred and twenty-one, the number stopping out like the frozen time in our machine box.

There was its beep, something cheerful and final; then after a long time, a shutting click.

He hasn’t shown up ever since.

-

-

-

I wake up to a weird, but familiar sensation.

I’m used to the Connection. It is when everything starts to meld down to darkness as the world spins, fast and even faster, fast _forward,_ making me feel like leaving my consciousness behind. Then there is a limit, an open gate, at the end of that very long process; once it passed everything would just abruptly _stops._ Whenever I open my eyes again, there is light bursting through the screen; new colors, new sounds, overload of sensation, like waking up a whole new world.

Usually he would greet me at the other end, appearance different each times but still comfortingly, familiarly _him._ His eyes had been red, gold, scarlet ruby, white as diamond, black, even colorless; I wonder what color he would have, this time.

I open my own eyes, for real now, and stare at this world. It’s even more gorgeous than the last, and it has been so long. So, so, so long. Above everything, I love new worlds because they mean I will have my master back _._ It means a fresh start: new monsters to get, fresh enemies to chase, a new promise for him; who is now standing before me with a small, novel red-and-white machine.

He is not as small anymore, though. The dimensions feel so gigantic, endless, vivid, so real, so _beautiful,_ and I realize this when he leans in close.

“I am gonna make you the very best,” he says again; I remember the six factors, broken down into six battles. The machine calls out my name. “Like no one ever was.”

That means something. He walks forward, and I follow him down the victory road.

 

-

-

-

 


End file.
